Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have the most user friendly start I’ve ever seen in a Pokemon game

For years, mainline Pokemon have been fairly traditional in how they start. You live with your mom, you leave, you meet the adult who will have you do work, and you start your adventure. Very early on you learn the controls and how to catch Pokemon. It’s how it always goes.

But I’ve never seen a Pokemon game do it with the pizazz Pokemon Scarlet and Violet puts out there. They even let you fully work on your character’s look before leaving the house. You have a variety of clothing, eye shapes and colors, hair styles and colors, a ton of tools to make your character look like more than a default normie for the first part of the game.

They don’t spend time on boring things like having a professor explaining his Pokedex, it’s just an app someone puts on your phone, much to the dismay of a certain character.

They instead tell you about the world you’re in and make it feel like it’s all a part of something bigger.

One of my favorite aspects though is that the first area is designed in such a way that you won’t really have any regrets over which starter you picked. Normally, you pick a Pokemon and then, when you get to the first gym, either find out you picked something it’s super weak to or you get your Pokeballs handed to you.

This is partially due to the fact that the Pokemon you normally find early in the game are confined to a normal type, a flying type, and sometimes a bug type. Not here!

In the area where they teach you to catch Pokemon, there’s already six different ones you can get.

• Lechonk (Normal)
• Tarountula (Bug)
• Hoppip (Grass/Flying)
• Fletchling (Flying/Normal [but evolves into Fire/Flying])
• Pawmi (Electric)
• Scatterbug (Bug)

That’s pretty impressive! Especially with three of those being new.

But that’s not all. By the time I even made it to the first Pokecenter I had caught 22 different Pokemon including two different types of Diglett. I had attacks from dark to fairy to electric, well before even KNOWING about gym leaders. It’s incredible.

This with the fact that I was able to make my character look how I wanted out the gate means that within the first hour of playing I already had an interesting character AND an interesting team.

I never knew how much I felt held back by the previous games until I saw how good I can have it.

I’m still making my way through but man, I absolutely love the options this game starts you with. It makes it so much more interesting out of the gate.